by Matt Rogers
They still might.
Not wasting any time in case there were armed men lying in wait, King kept low and hurried into the hotel room.
CHAPTER 12
He took in his surroundings in milliseconds.
No-one home.
Making sure he could see every inch of the hotel room, he breathed a sigh of relief and turned away. The bathroom door lay wide open — there was no-one hiding in there. The room was deserted. King snatched the wooden door off the hallway floor with both hands and propped it up loosely in the door frame. That would attract less suspicion than if he left it on the ground.
He took five long minutes to scrutinise the hotel room section-by-section. For the most part, it was kept sparse. Wherever Nasser was, the man must have kept all of his most valuable possessions on him. King found snack wrappers and a few changes of clothes. Apart from that, nothing. The room’s contents consisted of a large double bed with twin bedside tables, a cabinet with a flat-screen television mounted on top and a low wooden desk with various tourist brochures and a copy of the Quran.
King ducked underneath the desk and grabbed the waste bin resting on the floor. He checked its contents. More wrappers, plus a discarded receipt. He studied the receipt and raised an eyebrow.
‘There we go,’ he muttered.
It showed the purchase of two tickets to an ensemble performance at the Cairo Opera House at 7:00p.m. that evening. The receipt had been printed at the ticket booth there, then brought back here in somebody’s pocket — probably Nasser’s — and thrown in the bin.
King memorised the information on the ticket before throwing it back and putting the bin back into place. He didn’t want any attention drawn to the fact that he knew of Nasser’s location later that night.
He moved to the bed and overturned it, making sure to cause as much distress to the room as possible. He tossed the sheets across the room, threw open the wardrobe and overturned the television, smashing the screen into fragments.
It had to look like an ordinary ransacking. Even if Nasser returned to the room and suspected it was another operative after him, King didn’t want the man abandoning his plans to attend the opera. It was the one lead he had — and he’d been anticipating a whole lot more.
Useless trip, he thought. There were countless revelations he had expected to come across up here, the most major being the appearance of Khalil Nasser himself.
King wheeled around to leave and disappear from the premises. He didn’t want anyone else knowing he was here.
As he turned to the door, a nerve twitched, giving him the ominous feeling that someone was watching him silently.
He looked up.
And stared directly into the barrel of a 9mm handgun.
King froze in place, not daring to move a muscle. He took in several things at once. First, the make of the weapon. He hadn’t seen many like it before, but he placed it quickly enough. It was a Viper JAWS pistol, manufactured in Jordan and the standard issue handgun for the Jordanian Armed Forces. It would be simple enough to smuggle a truckload of them across the border. Which meant the assailant was from here.
One of Nasser’s men, no doubt.
He couldn’t ascertain the man’s ethnicity due to the thick balaclava covering all his features — likely to hide his identity from the swathe of cameras covering the lobby. King hadn’t cared to mask his own face, due mostly to the fact that he never would have made it to the room otherwise. The guy in front of him was well-built, dressed in khaki fatigues and a long-sleeved black combat shirt. He had tucked his shirt into his waistband. He wore heavy-duty combat boots. Top of the range stuff.
Nasser spared no expense.
King spoke first. ‘You going to shoot me?’
Nothing. No nod, no shake of the head, no verbal response. The masked man kept the barrel pointed right between King’s eyes, his hand barely wavering, deadly still in the air, poised to shoot. King felt beads of sweat break out on his forehead. Whoever the man was, he was a ghost. He had crept into the hallway so silently that King hadn’t noticed his presence until he’d turned directly into the barrel.
He was lying in wait.
You fucking idiot, King.
Then a single gesture with the gun. The man shook the barrel toward the exposed doorway and stepped aside, allowing King enough space to pass. There wasn’t anything he could do to mount a retaliation. Not yet. The guy kept impeccable distance, staying just far enough out of range to prohibit any kind of lunge for the weapon.
King followed the given instructions.
What else was he to do?
All the training in the world couldn’t mask the heart-pounding reality of having a loaded gun pointed at your head. He walked tentatively past the masked assailant, ready to act on a millisecond’s notice if he sensed a lapse in the man’s concentration. But there was nothing.
No hesitation, no mistakes.
The guy was a professional in every sense of the word.
Once out in the corridor, King didn’t expect they would head for the elevator bank. The risk of running into civilians was too high, and the combination of a balaclava and a handgun would cause serious commotion in the lobby. There had to be another way out.
There was.
The fact that King was still alive meant Nasser wanted to talk. Lopez and Price had likely been dispatched quickly, before any sufficient answers could be found. He would want to know exactly who King was working for and what interest they had in the man’s dealings.
The assailant prodded King in the back with the Viper’s barrel, a short jab to get him moving without lingering within range. King had no opportunity to spin and smash the gun out of the man’s hands.
The guy was too experienced for a move like that to work.
They set off in the opposite direction to the elevators, heading for the other end of the hallway. King’s footsteps made no noise on the plush carpet. Neither did the masked man’s. He couldn’t ascertain exactly where the guy was, which would make any action difficult without catching a bullet in the brain.
King saw a cream-coloured door up ahead with a glass strip at eye level, different to the typical wooden hotel door. This led to something other than a stock-standard hotel room, likely a stairwell or some kind of fire escape.
As soon as King noticed it, he felt the Viper prod him again — this time between the shoulder blades. A universal command.
That way.
He moved slowly toward the door, unsure as to how experienced the masked man was. If he had little knowledge of tense situations, it would only take a single sudden movement by King for his finger to twitch and the gun to go off. King wanted to prevent that from happening.
His pulse raced as he pushed the door open and stepped into an artificially-chilled concrete stairwell spiralling down into the depths of the building.
The fight-or-flight mechanism had kicked in, charging his veins with adrenalin, turning his hands cold and clammy. Trouble was, he wasn’t in a position to do either. He had to keep his arms deathly still as he walked. Perhaps he could react once they reached their destination. Right now, he was a sitting duck.
Now their footsteps felt like thunderclaps. Each footfall echoed off the walls as King descended the stairwell at a measured, controlled pace. He heard the masked man two steps above him at all times, but didn’t dare look over his shoulder. One wrong move would spell disaster.
They made it to what appeared to be the ground floor. King reached for the handle that would lead to the lobby and the assailant grunted something in Arabic, his voice laced with intensity. King snatched his hand away. Clearly the wrong move. He was prodded again by the Viper, this time a little harder, a little more panicked. He peeled away from the door and continued to clamber down the stairs.
They reached the very bottom of the stairwell thirty seconds later. King saw a nondescript wooden door and was met by another jab with the barrel. He opened it and the pair stepped through — King first, then the masked guy
— into a deserted underground parking garage.
The entire space smelt of old garbage. Dumpsters of varying sizes lined the walls, many full to the brim and uncared for. This was the side of the luxurious hotel that most visitors didn’t see. King guessed it was some kind of staff parking lot — management wouldn’t present such a disgusting package for tourists to leave their vehicles. Dust and mud were flecked across the cracked concrete floor. A few cars — most ten years old and beat to shit — lay around in some of the empty lots.
At the end of the poorly-lit garage, a shiny Audi Q7 four-wheel-drive rested idly in the shadows, engine running. There was no-one behind the wheel. King thought he saw a flash of movement in the rear seat, then the masked man jabbed him in that direction.
It stood out against everything else in the rundown garage. The vehicle didn’t belong here. King had no trouble discerning where he was headed.
Halfway across the parking lot, a flash of movement in King’s peripheral vision caused him to turn his head. It must have caught the assailant’s attention too — otherwise he would be dead. He looked over to see an elderly woman in her sixties — her hair covered in rollers and her body covered by a casual hotel robe — step out of an identical wooden door a little further down. She had a knotted garbage bag in her left hand. As she looked up from the floor and made eye contact with the masked man, King clenched his teeth.
He feared the worst.
He was right.
He jolted in place as a shot rang out through the empty garage, so close behind his head that for a moment he thought he would feel the searing hot pain of a bullet tumbling through his body. His eardrums rattled from the report. The muzzle flash was distinctly noticeable, a bright hot light that flashed for a millisecond before fading away.
As it did, the corpse of the elderly hotel guest slapped the dirty ground.
She had taken the bullet directly between her eyes, dead before she could even comprehend what she saw. A lack of witnesses was clearly of the utmost importance to Nasser and his men. King felt hot rage in his blood, which he knew he had to stifle if he ever wanted to make it out alive. Despite his career and despite his shortcomings, innocent deaths infuriated him like nothing else. It had led to unimaginable trouble throughout his career — and even after it.
He tightened his fists until the knuckles cracked, but otherwise remained still. He waited for the inevitable jab with the barrel before making for the Audi resting a dozen feet away, headlights on. The dead woman stayed where she was, arms and legs splayed, responsible for nothing but killed all the same. The garbage bag previously gripped tight between her fingers had torn open as she had fallen. Its contents spilled across the floor beside her.
King felt his head steaming as the masked man directed him into the passenger seat.
There would be hell to pay…
As soon as he slipped into the soft leather seat, another cold barrel jammed into the back of his neck. From the brief contact the gunmetal had with his skin, King guessed it was another Viper JAWS. This one lay in the hands of whoever had been lying in wait in the back seat. So far, they had stayed completely silent. King didn’t dare turn his head, so he wasn’t sure whether there were one or more men back there.
They had planned this to perfection.
The original masked thug slipped into the driver’s seat, discarding his gun in the back seat. Now that there were more weapons on King to keep him frozen in place, the man could concentrate on driving. He shifted gears and stamped on the accelerator. King felt his stomach drop as the guy used the full power of the turbo diesel engine. The wheels spun as he turned out of the parking space and gunned it up the exit ramp.
They burst out into the back streets of Zamalek, the hot sun pounding against the window. King squinted in the daylight and the Q7 roared off the mark, leaving the dead woman to be discovered by hotel staff.
CHAPTER 13
The streets were largely deserted at this time of day. Most residents of Zamalek were dining at the riverside restaurants or relaxing pool-side and soaking in the sun. The Audi passed no more than three cars on the journey out of the district’s centre.
King worked out where they were headed in an instant.
‘We’re leaving Zamalek?’ he said, testing the other occupants of the vehicle.
‘Suker khaljic!’ a deep voice in the back barked.
Shut your mouth, King translated. He knew enough rudimentary Arabic to be able to decipher certain phrases.
Whereas previously the gun had hovered an inch behind King’s neck, now he felt the cold steel press into his skin — hard enough to send a message. The man behind him twisted the barrel, aggravating the flesh.
King grimaced and decided to follow the guy’s advice.
At least for now.
The Viper stayed against his skin as they drove out of the residential sector and made for one of the many bridges connecting Zamalek to the rest of Cairo. A sign overhead read 15 May Bridge, with the rest in Arabic. It was a sprawling concrete number with three lanes on each side, passing over the Nile and dipping into Cairo.
The driver — still hiding his face with the balaclava — got onto one of the entrance ramps and floored the big Audi up the bridge. Here, the traffic was a little more congested. They passed the trademarked dirty white vans and a handful of luxury vehicles leaving the affluent district behind for the afternoon. The first half of the bridge arced over an amalgamation of other roads before it fell away into the stark blue waters of the Nile.
The Audi accelerated through an empty portion of the road until the driver had to brake behind a sedan in the middle lane doing half the speed limit. Restless to reach his destination, he changed lanes violently, swerving around the car and dipping into the outer lane. King tried to look across without turning his head. He glimpsed a thin wire fence separating the traffic from a fifty-foot drop to the flowing water below.
He sucked in a deep breath of air, aware that over two-hundred pounds of muscle could be put to good use in such a confined space.
Now.
Charged with unimaginable adrenalin, he ducked forward — away from the Viper’s barrel — in one fluid motion. He sensed the man in the back panic, taken aback by the sudden movement after ten minutes of complete stillness. King heard the man’s hand clatter against metal as he did his best to thrust the Viper through the gap below the headrest. It would enable him to put a bullet into King’s wide back.
He wouldn’t let that happen.
Half a second after ducking, he reached down and yanked the seat adjuster near his feet. He heard a click as the mechanism released. He pushed off with both feet, slamming all of his bulk into the seat, thrusting it back at incredible speed. It sliced along its tracks and slammed into place at the end of its short trip. King heard the savage snap of the man’s wrist as the bone shattered, caught under the headrest as the seat came flying back at him. He let out an audible grunt of agony and let go of the gun.
Perfect.
King wasted no time. As soon as the seat slammed home against its restraints, he spun and hit the driver square in the face with the side of his hand, balled up into a fist. Ten years of training and a massive dose of energy lent him strength. He broke the driver’s nose under the balaclava, feeling the sensitive cartilage give under the shot.
To add just a little more pain, King brought his hand back just a few inches before letting it go again. The second punch had much less power — but that wasn’t the aim. It slammed home against the already broken nose, crunching bones. King already felt blood spurting out of the guy’s nostrils, soaking the balaclava from the inside.
The driver yelped and let go of the wheel, hands flying to his face.
King dove across the centre console and snatched the wheel with both hands. He had perhaps a second before either of them recovered enough to fight back.
That was all the time in the world.
He wrenched the wheel to the left and the Audi careered into the wire
fence at close to sixty miles an hour.
Under the five-thousand-pound weight of the four-wheel-drive, the fence gave way. The shriek of tearing metal raged all around them.
King felt his pulse skyrocket as the vehicle lurched over the edge of the bridge and fell like deadweight — nose-first — toward the water below.
CHAPTER 14
The Audi covered the empty space between the bridge and the water in the blink of an eye. One moment King had a hand splayed on the dashboard, knuckles white, teeth clenched, dreading the inevitable impact that would rattle every bone in his body. A brief instant later, the hood hit the surface and smashed through, sending geysers of water in all directions.
The windshield went dark as the front of the car disappeared under the water. King grunted as he fell out of his seat, slamming his hip against the dashboard and coming precariously close to being sent out the cracked windscreen. Neither of the other two occupants had been wearing seatbelts either. The driver crunched into the steering wheel chest-first, letting out a moan barely audible over the commotion of the crash.
King heard the man in the back slam into the other side of his seat. He screamed in such a way that could only signify he had landed directly on his broken wrist.
Senses overloading, King threw his gaze around the car, searching desperately for the Viper that had clattered out of the man’s hand five seconds earlier. It was nowhere to be seen. He swore and re-positioned himself as the Audi began to sink.
Although the car had hit the water at a vertical angle, it righted itself quickly. King scrambled back into his seat as the roof disappeared under the surface and the interior was shrouded by darkness. It was impossible to see out the windscreen. The car was sinking too fast.
